A number of systems have been devised for dispatching of vehicles or other services upon demand. The complexity of dispatching systems ranges from fully manual systems to systems employing elaborate computer databases and tracking systems.
To dispatch vehicles accurately and in a timely fashion, several things must be done concurrently. Vehicles must be tracked so that their location is known so that they may be efficiently selected for future jobs. The position and status of dispatched vehicles must be monitored to determine if they are on time or delayed. Customer requests must be received and posted for dispatching, and then dispatched. Delayed arrivals should be identified and reported to the customer as soon as possible.
A fully manual dispatching system (such as is employed by smaller taxi companies), requires a single human being to perform all of the tasks identified above. More modern dispatching systems provide automation of some of the described tasks.
For example, various systems have been established to manage the reception and posting of customer requests. For example, the “Life-TRAK” is system, available from the assignee of the present application, provides a database server storing a database of customer request records. New records are generated by call takers who receive incoming telephone calls from customers. Also, records may be generated at remote sites, for example by contract customers, and transmitted into the central database by telephone connections. The customer requests are then reported to dispatchers who determine when the requests are in need of service, and dispatch a vehicle as needed.
There are also commercially available systems for assisting the dispatching tasks described above. For example, there are commercially available Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) systems which automatically track (typically via satellite navigation) the locations of managed vehicles, so that this information can be reported to a dispatcher in textual or graphic form to assist the dispatcher determining the locations of vehicles. Typically, the dispatcher uses this information to select a vehicle for a particular job, and then forwards instructions to the driver to assign them the job. Often, the AVL includes data fields where the dispatcher may store an indication of the status of a vehicle (e.g., dispatched or available) and the vehicle's capabilities (e.g., wheelchair-compatible, etc.) so that this information can be used by the dispatcher in selecting a vehicle for a job and monitoring activity of the vehicles.
Advanced AVL systems further facilitate dispatching, by automatically identifying, upon request, the nearest vehicles to a given address or latitude/longitude position, to assist the dispatcher in selecting a vehicle for dispatch. Furthermore, AVL systems may also include a street map database and search algorithm through which the AVL can identify a street route from one address to another upon request from the dispatcher.
In some cases, the dispatcher communicates with the vehicles via radio communication or cellular telephone connections. In other cases, the AVL system itself includes support for textual communication between dispatchers and the vehicles through mobile data terminals (MDT's) mounted in the vehicle, which typically make use of underlying cellular communication networks.